1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for generating a unique identifier (UID) required for performing an operation of a virtual machine (VM) in a distributed computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
A distributed computing environment has been developed to process an operation, which is difficult to be processed by one computing device, using a plurality of computing devices connected to the network. In the distributed computing environment, an instance to be performed in each virtual machine should allocate a unique identifier (UID) to each object in order to distinguish objects required for the operation.
As a method for allocating a unique identifier to each of many objects used in many instances performed in many virtual machines, there is a method using a universally unique identifier (UUID) or a globally unique identifier (GUID). However, in the method using the universally unique identifier (UUID) or the globally unique identifier (GUID), the number of values that can be generated using a random number is very large, but the same unique identifier may be generated repeatedly. Further, in a method in which a single central server generates a unique identifier and provides the unique identifier to each instance, a bottle-neck may occur when the single central server processes allocation requests of all unique identifiers.